The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett (carter reed txt) 📕

“Madame is suffering?” the landlady began.

Sophia refused offers of food and nursing.

“Madame knows without doubt that monsieur has gone away?”

“Has he paid the bill?” Sophia asked bluntly.

“But yes, madame, till tomorrow. Then madame has want of nothing?”

“If you will extinguish the candle,” said Sophia.

He had deserted her, then!

“All this,” she reflected, listening in the dark to the ceaseless rattle of the street, “because mother and Constance wanted to see the elephant, and I had to go into father’s room! I should never have caught sight of him from the drawingroom window!”

IV

She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself: “I’m all alone now, and I’m going to be ill. I am ill.” She saw herself dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which when it came increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it. She went through all the interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from the moment when she could scarcely discern the window to the moment when she could read the word ‘Bock’ on the red circlet of paper which had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would never sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she perceived that she must have been asleep.

“Enter,” she murmured.

There entered the menial in alpaca. His waxen face showed a morose commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed—he seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity—and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand.

It was Chirac’s card.

“Monsieur asked for monsieur,” said the waiter. “And then, as monsieur had gone away he demanded to see madame. He says it is very important.”

Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense of relief at this chance of speaking to some one whom she knew. She tried to reflect rationally.

“What time is it?” she inquired.

“Eleven o’clock, madame.”

This was surprising. The fact that it was eleven o’clock destroyed the remains of her self-confidence. How could it be eleven o’clock, with the dawn scarcely finished?

“He says it is very important,” repeated the waiter, imperturbably and solemnly. “Will madame see him an instant?”

Between resignation and anticipation she said: “Yes.”

“It is well, madame,” said the waiter, disappearing without a sound.

She sat up and managed to drag her matinee from a chair and put it around her shoulders. Then she sank back from weakness, physical and spiritual. She hated to receive Chirac in a bedroom, and particularly in that bedroom. But the hotel had no public room except the dining-room, which began to be occupied after eleven o’clock. Moreover, she could not possibly get up. Yes, on the whole she was pleased to see Chirac. He was almost her only acquaintance, assuredly the only being whom she could by any stretch of meaning call a friend, in the whole of Europe. Gerald and she had wandered to and fro, skimming always over the real life of nations, and never penetrating into it. There was no place for them, because they had made none. With the exception of Chirac, whom an accident of business had thrown, into Gerald’s company years before, they had no social relations. Gerald was not a man to make friends; he did not seem to need friends, or at any rate to feel the want of them. But, as chance had given him Chirac, he maintained the connection whenever they came to Paris. Sophia, of course, had not been able to escape from the solitude imposed by existence in hotels. Since her marriage she had never spoken to a woman in the way of intimacy. But once or twice she had approached intimacy with Chirac, whose wistful admiration for her always aroused into activity her desire to charm.

Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly, apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety. And as he saw her lying on her back, with flushed features, her hair disarranged, and only the grace of the silk ribbons of her matinee to mitigate the melancholy repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety seemed to deepen.

“Dear madame,” he stammered, “all my excuses!” He hastened to the bedside and kissed her hand—a little peek according to his custom. “You are ill?”

“I have my migraine,” she said. “You want Gerald?”

“Yes,” he said diffidently. “He had promised–-”

“He has left me,” Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the words.

“Left you?” He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had retired.

“Quitted me! Abandoned me! Last night!”

“Not possible!” he breathed.

She nodded. She felt intimate with him. Like all secretive persons, she could be suddenly expansive at times.

“It is serious?” he questioned.

“All that is most serious,” she replied.

“And you ill! Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example!” He waved his hat about.

“What is it you want, Chirac?” she demanded, in a confidential tone.

“Eh, well,” said Chirac. “You do not know where he has gone?”

“No. What do you want?” she insisted.

He was nervous. He fidgetted. She guessed that, though warm with sympathy for her plight, he was preoccupied by interests and apprehensions of his own. He did not refuse her request temporarily to leave the astonishing matter of her situation in order to discuss the matter of his visit.

“Eh, well! He came to me yesterday afternoon in the Rue Croissant to borrow some money.”

She understood then the object of Gerald’s stroll on the previous afternoon.

“I hope you didn’t lend him any,” she said.

“Eh, well! It was like this. He said he ought to have received five thousand francs yesterday morning, but that he had had a telegram that it would not arrive till to-day. And he had need of five hundred francs at once. I had not five hundred francs”—he smiled sadly, as if to insinuate that he did not handle such sums- -“but I borrowed it from the cashbox of the journal. It is necessary, absolutely, that I should return it this morning.” He spoke with increased seriousness. “Your husband said he would take a cab and bring me the money immediately on the arrival of the post this morning—about nine o’clock. Pardon me for deranging you with such a–-”

He stopped. She could see that he really was grieved to ‘derange’ her, but that circumstances pressed.

“At my paper,” he murmured, “it is not so easy as that to—in fine–-!”

Gerald had genuinely been at his last francs. He had not lied when she thought he had lied. The nakedness of his character showed now. Instantly upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful supply of money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully. He had, in fact, simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental addition of endangering Chirac’s reputation and situation—as a sort of reward to Chirac for the kindness! And, further, no sooner had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first fatuous temptation. He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple. And as for common prudence—had he not risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or three days? Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop at nothing, at nothing whatever.

“You did not know that he was coming to me?” asked Chirac, pulling his short, silky brown beard.

“No,” Sophia answered.

“But he said that you had charged him with your friendlinesses to me!” He nodded his head once or twice, sadly but candidly accepting, in his quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human nature—reconciling himself to them at once.

Sophia revolted at this crowning detail of the structure of Gerald’s rascality.

“It is fortunate that I can pay you,” she said.

“But–-” he tried to protest.

“I have quite enough money.”

She did not say this to screen Gerald, but merely from amour-propre. She would not let Chirac think that she was the wife of a man bereft of all honour. And so she clothed Gerald with the rag of having, at any rate, not left her in destitution as well as in sickness. Her assertion seemed a strange one, in view of the fact that he had abandoned her on the previous evening—that is to say, immediately after the borrowing from Chirac. But Chirac did not examine the statement.

“Perhaps he has the intention to send me the money. Perhaps, after all, he is now at the offices–-”

“No,” said Sophia. “He is gone. Will you go downstairs and wait for me. We will go together to Cook’s office. It is English money I have.”

“Cook’s?” he repeated. The word now so potent had then little significance. “But you are ill. You cannot–-”

“I feel better.”

She did. Or rather, she felt nothing except the power of her resolve to remove the painful anxiety from that wistful brow. The shame of the trick played on Chirac awakened new forces in her. She dressed in a physical torment which, however, had no more reality than a nightmare. She searched in a place where even an inquisitive husband would not think of looking, and then, painfully, she descended the long stairs, holding to the rail, which swam round and round her, carrying the whole staircase with it. “After all,” she thought, “I can’t be seriously ill, or I shouldn’t have been able to get up and go out like this. I never guessed early this morning that I could do it! I can’t possibly be as ill as I thought I was!”

And in the vestibule she encountered Chirac’s face, lightening at the sight of her, which proved to him that his deliverance was really to be accomplished.

“Permit me–-”

“I’m all right,” she smiled, tottering. “Get a cab.” It suddenly occurred to her that she might quite as easily have given him the money in English notes; he could have changed them. But she had not thought. Her brain would not operate. She was dreaming and waking together.

He helped her into the cab.

V

In the bureau de change there was a little knot of English, people, with naive, romantic, and honest faces, quite different from the faces outside in the street. No corruption in those faces, but a sort of wondering and infantile sincerity, rather out of its element and lost in a land too unsophisticated, seeming to belong to an earlier age! Sophia liked their tourist stare, and their plain and ugly clothes. She longed to be back in England, longed for a moment with violence, drowning in that desire.

The English clerk behind his brass bars took her notes, and carefully examined them one by one. She watched him, not entirely convinced of his reality, and thought vaguely of the detestable morning when she had abstracted the notes from Gerald’s pocket. She was filled with pity for the simple, ignorant Sophia of those days, the Sophia who still had a few ridiculous illusions concerning Gerald’s character. Often, since, she had been tempted to break into the money, but she had always withstood the temptation, saying to herself that an hour of more urgent need would